• I was expecting some humility, admission of faults and an olive branch.

      Instead, the CEO just doubled down and comes to the AMA with canned, smug responses. What a joke.

    • As people were pointing out on Reddit, in this case I don’t actually hope that, because the people who suffer as a result are the users. Tons of useful content that users have created and contributed, other people would just never have access to again.

  • The basic mistake I see us all make is assume that Spez has any emotional attachment to Reddit (let alone anything close to how attached we are to it). He doesn’t.

    Once you realize that he’s 100% in it for the money and is utterly uncaring about Reddit’s users (i.e. you), you’ll realize that he couldn’t give less of a shit about actually addressing our concerns.

    This will also make you immune to any PR sanitising lies him and his team spout, as all such lies hinge on your willingness to give him some benefit of the doubt. We shouldn’t.

    • The example I give again, and again, and again is Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Craigslist remains private (which shields it from being gutted by Wall Street vultures, for sure) so we don’t know for sure, but Craig is believed to retain a controlling stake alongside current CEO Jim Buckmaster and eBay (which purchased a large stake from an exiting employee).

      Craigslist makes about $600 million annually, and I’m sure provides a nice living for the executives and employees there, but has remained true to its core function of providing transparent and easy classifieds posting to everyone (mostly for free, even!)

      Notice what happens when an organization becomes a vehicle for profit, beyond simply “self-sustaining profit.” Notice how taking on investors practically guarantees that outcome.

      I thought Reddit was dead the day Conde Nast bought it. They’ve survived quite a bit longer! This day had to come. Let’s move on.

      We can build something that primarily exists to create a community.

    • yeah pretty much

      spez sees 3rd party users as an obstacle between himself and more money. so he will gladly trade the bad pr and loss of certain users if it means that even a small fraction end up switching to the official app and it gains him another 0.1% in wealth for the IPO

      he claimed that old.reddit wasn’t going anywhere, but we all know that it will be crippled to the point of unusability

  • I had no idea in what scenario imaginable that this was going to go well or improve things, even when it was announced.

    “Hey Steve, you were right. We realize we were taking your mercy to keep the API for granted. We’ll not only cancel the subreddit blackouts but we’ll stop using 3rd party apps, install the official app and click on 5 ads just because of how admirable your AMA post was.”

    -Redditors in Steve’s mind

  • "[…] recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.”

    Well, Selig did wait with leaking that phone call until he felt like all the bridges had been more than burned from Reddit’s side and he officially did not want to do business with Reddit anymore, so I don’t think that will be an issue…

  • Admitting that “Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.” just shows to the world, that they don’t know how to run a business. This should be warning shot for every investor.

      • Exactly! I’m not a rich investor person, but nobody with a brain would invest in a company bleeding money, and that was such a terrible move to admit. If their PR isn’t a half-working AI after firing all those people, they should’ve been horrified between that and the Christian Selig/Apollo comments.

        You also can’t count on Reddit becoming a meme stock, especially with absolutely zero regard for the users who make these meme stocks happen.

    • This whole thing is all about trying to monetize user-generated content by selling it at a high premium to large AI companies. If they allow a lower pricing tier for 3pa’s, other companies/individuals will find a way to use that lower tier for training models, and this is the only thing spez sees as a viable profit model for reddit.

  • I have no clever thing to say except it seems Spez is, without joking or being mean, clinically insane.
    The dedicated content creator userbase is long gone, and it shows. The casual content creator is leaving. The lurker and occasional poster will have nothing to read, except the thinly veiled ads pretending to be organic posts. It’s quickly becoming a digital wasteland. Fun to digg through maybe, just like we leaf through an old book sometimes.

  • I’m not understanding a shit about kbin vs lemmy, but in doubt I just created an account on both and I’m on my way to delete my reddit account. Hi new friends!

    • Lemmy and kbin are different things which work on the same backend and are part of the fediverse. Similar to how mastodon is fediverse counterpart of Twitter, lemmy is fediverse counterpart of Reddit, and kbin is a unique thing which is more akin to old school blogging sites.

      • Okay, now that’s more clear, but I’m struggling to understand if I have to use all of them separately or I can do it all through kbin…I can use Lemmy and Mastodon through kbin somehow, right?

        • You can access and comment in Lemmy from kbin, but I’m not sure if you can do the same for Mastodon. But Mastodon users can certainly use their accounts to comment on Lemmy. The beauty of the fediverse (or threadiverse, as some guys like to call it)

        • Kbin is sort of a hybrid between Lemmy and Mastodon. “Magazines” are their equivalent of Lemmy communities/Reddit subreddits, while the “Microblog” section is like a Mastodon/Twitter feed. You should be able to follow Lemmy communities and Mastodon users both on kbin.

          I think Mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities and comment on Lemmy through Mastodon, too, though from what I’ve read the Mastodon UI isn’t really set up to show Lemmy content in an organized way with good threading since its main aim is to support microblogging and following individual users. There are some things in the fediverse that you can do from multiple platforms, but will have an easier time doing it from a platform that is designed around that function.

        •  Yoreo   ( @Yoreo@lemmy.ml ) 
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          61 year ago

          It’s unfortunate you went about it the way you did since they can still monetize off of the entirety of your comment and post history. When you delete your account, all your comments and posts remain. They’re just no longer attached to your account name since that is what you deleted.

          I was a bit more malicious and did the opposite by keeping my account intact, but gutting everything from within. So now every thread I ever commented in has “user deleted comment” sprinkled all throughout hundreds or thousands of threads.

          My account is now a fine metaphor for what reddit has become. Just a hollow facade of what it once was.

  •  ash   ( @ash@lemm.ee ) 
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    201 year ago

    Kinda glad this happened. This is getting so much more PR than Spez could have anticipated. Former Apollo user here, loving the app on iOS & it’s pretty straightforward. Hope this gets more active and i think this might be my new home :)

  • This feels so surreal. I just watched a video the other day about how Apollo used to have a friendly relationship with Reddit. It’s so weird how spez is doing all this mudslinging. No good deed unpunished.

  • Since u/spez seems to want to continue down this road and bar people of experiencing reddit the way they want, I decided to delete all of my post and comment history within my account there.

    It’s obvious that those of us that want to continue to use 3rd party apps are considered dead weight in his eyes, so I decided that anything and everything I posted is likely of no value to Reddit.

    • It’s us the users who create & place value within that platform. In subjects of our interests. Reddit company is adamant with their decision with limiting our precense alone.

      Make sense that people have started migrating into other places/ services such as this one.